This week we’re looking at the House of Lords. What does it do? And how, if at all, should it be reformed?
Proposals for reform of the UK’s House of Lords are in the news. In the wake of a report by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Labour leader and – if the polls are to be believed – likely future Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said that he would abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a so-called Assembly of the Nations and Regions.
This week Alan Renwick is joined by Meg Russell, Director of the UCL Constitution Unit and Professor of British and Comparative Politics in the UCL Department of Political Science. Meg is the leading expert on the House of Lords and on second chambers more broadly, having conducted research on the subject for more than two decades.
Meg gives us a primer on the House of Lords and helps answer the questions: does it need reform? What is the best way of doing it?
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SUMMARY KEYWORDS
lords, chamber, commons, house, proposals, people, reform, elected, appointed, government, party, members, question, ucl, labour, political parties, power, parliament, hereditary, generally
SPEAKERS
Alan Renwick, Meg Russell
Alan Renwick 00:05
Hello this is UCL Uncovering Politics. This week we're looking at the House of Lords, what does it do? And how, if at all, should it be reformed?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
Proposals for reform of the UK's House of Lords are in the news in the wake of a report by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Labour leader, and if the polls are to be believed, likely future Prime Minister Kier Starmer, has said that we should abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a so called assembly of the nations and regions. So is that a good idea? Does the House of Lords need reform at all? If so, is there a better way of doing it?
Well, there is no better person in the world to put such questions to than Meg Russell, Director of the UCL Constitution Unit and Professor of British and Comparative Politics in the UCL Department of Political Science. Meg is the leading experts on the House of Lords and on second chambers more broadly, having conducted research on the subject for more than two decades, yielding two books, multiple Constitution Unit reports, and much else besides.
And I'm delighted to say that Meg joins me now. Welcome Meg, to UCL Uncovering Politics, and before we start talking about how the House of Lord has tried to make change, we should understand the form that it currently takes. So could you give us a quick overview of how the House of Lords is currently composed? And I guess also what it currently does?
Meg Russell 01:51
Okay, well, I could talk about that for the length of the entire podcast, and sometimes I do, but let me try and be as brief as I can. The House of Lords is the second chamber of the UK Parliament. It obviously sits alongside the House of Commons and seeks in many ways to be complimentary to the House of Commons. It's a very ancient institution in its origins, but it has evolved a lot over time. So famously, it's an unelected institution. The majority of members are life peers, that is they are appointed for life to the second chamber.
But there are a minority of members who are hereditary peers, which means that they have inherited titles, they don't inherit their seats in the Lord's, they're actually replaced by a strange system of by-elections, which we might come on to talk about a bit more. And then there are 26 Bishops and Archbishop's of the Church of England, which is also not entirely uncontroversial. So there are 26 Bishops and Archbishop's, 92 hereditary peers, and then the rest of the chamber which adds up to a somewhat shocking 800 members, are life peers.
In terms of what it does, it broadly does similar things to the House of Commons. So it scrutinises legislation, it holds debates, there are question times with ministers, it has a series of select committees. But in important ways, it's also quite different. So the most crucial way that I always emphasise with my students is that we have a parliamentary system of government, which means that the government must retain the confidence of Parliament in order to remain in office, it can be removed by Parliament if it loses that confidence. But that only applies to the House of Commons. So there's a much more sort of independent relationship between the government and the House of Lords than there is between the government and the House of Commons.
Consequently, the fact that the government doesn't have a majority in the House of Lords, which it doesn't, is not an immediate problem for the government. It makes it quite a difficult place to navigate for its legislation, but it can't be brought down. The House of Lords also has much reduced powers over financial matters. It generally sees bills second, them having gone through the House of Commons already, but some bills start in the Lord's. And it has a delaying power rather than an absolute veto. So it can amend legislation and send it back to the House of Commons for a second look. There are a lot of amendments, hundreds of amendments to government legislation in the Lord's every year. Most of those are fairly consensual. The Lords suggest changes, the government brings forward changes in response, but sometimes it defeats the government and if it does, that goes back to the Commons. And the government can encourage MPs to overturn those defeats if it wants to.
But generally there's a compromise on any sort of disagreements between the two chambers. The Select Committee system is different as well, as indeed are the question times. So select committees in the House of Commons are structured according to government departments, in the House of Lords, they are much more cross cutting, and there are several important select committees which focus on constitutional matters. So looking at the constitutionality of legislation, looking at the extent to which government is seeking to delegate powers to itself in legislation so that it can make changes without coming back to Parliament in the future, looking at human rights aspects, those kinds of things. And question time is also not organised departmentally. And questions on any day can be asked to any minister in effect. And it's quite a challenging environment for ministers, the House of Lords, because there's no government majority. Most of the ministers in there are relatively junior. So most Secretaries of State sit in the House of Commons. And there are a lot of experts in the Lords. So as a minister, you can have a question thrown at you from any direction. And it might be somebody who knows their subject really thoroughly. So it's quite a testing environment for ministers, but it's one where they can't simply win through the strength of the number of seats that the party has, or through making partisan and arguments. Because there are a lot of independent members in the Lord's, so nearly 200 of the 800 members don't take a party whip, mostly being crossbenchers. They kind of sit in judgement of the arguments between the parties and that sort of tones down the partisan banter in the chamber. And the arguments in there tend to be much more sort of reasoned and evidence based than perhaps they sometimes are in the House of Commons.
I feel like probably already given you a longer answer than you would have liked. But I could go on, I could go on for hours on this stuff. I hope that's enough.
Alan Renwick 06:41
No, that is a fantastic summary. Thank you. Does the House of Lords make a positive contribution through all of that, or does it really just delay and cause trouble for the government?
Meg Russell 06:51
Well, I would say it makes a positive contribution. I mean, I have to say, you know, I'm not we will come on, I think to some of the criticisms of the House of Lords, I'm not going to be a total defender of everything that it does. But I think that on balance, it does make a very positive contribution. And actually one of those positive contributions is delay. Because the very fact that having a second chamber slows down decision making will tend to lean you towards better decision making. It means that policy is considered not just by one set of people, but by a separate set of people who can look at it with fresh eyes. And the fact that there is a delay between the Commons looking at a bill and then the Lords subsequently looking at a bill means that there's an opportunity to think through a bit some of the debates in the Commons for maybe people who are outside Parliament who are experts, you know, in the public service, in academia, in business, or whatever, to look at those debates and say, well hang on a tick that didn't seem quite right, this should be looked at again. Often, it's only when a bill is in the commons, that people outside start to pay attention to what's going on.
So in the Lord's things that people felt were not sensible in the Commons can be fixed. So it not only brings its sort of expertise to bear in the particular interests of individual members, the very process of looking at legislation twice, I think, is a sensible process when you're changing the law to not be able to rush things through in the space of a week, using your party vote is a good thing. Scrutiny is a good thing and makes for better policymaking as a general rule, of course, you can have things slowed down too much, and too much partisan and fighting, that tends not to go on between the Commons and the Lords very much because the Lord's is always very aware of its role as the unelected chamber. So it doesn't sort of, it doesn't seek to have the same strength as the Commons. It doesn't claim that it's got equal legitimacy to be making decisions to the Commons. In effect, it makes suggestions for the Commons and in the end, the Commons will decide.
Alan Renwick 09:01
So you're suggesting that having a second chamber is desirable, because it's good to have a second look at things. And having a second chamber that involves quite as many experts as the House of Lords does is maybe desirable because it offers a different way of looking at things and an expert way of looking at things which contrasts with the the first chamber. Snd how just the second chamber in the UK compare with second chambers in other countries? Are there are other countries that have an elected second chamber is like this?
Meg Russell 09:30
There are some. I mean, if you look around the world, there are I think, at the current time 77 bicameral parliaments. That is bicameral, two chamber, parliaments as opposed to unicameral, single chamber parliaments. And those those second chambers, those 77, are remarkably diverse. So they exist, obviously in all sorts of different countries with all sorts of different traditions. They're made up in all sorts of different ways. One of the interesting things, you know, with the obvious comparator that people often look to for lots of things in the UK is the US where, of course, famously, there's an elected Senate, directly elected Senate, which is very powerful.
But if you look around the world, it's only less than a third of second chambers that are entirely directly elected. And most of them are like the US Senate in presidential systems, where the relationship between the executive and the legislature is a rather different one, it's a rather more sort of adversarial one, you don't have that confidence relationship. So it doesn't matter if you have people at each other's throats a bit, because each has their own independent, elected mandate, rather than them being able to pull each other down.
There are only I think, five directly elected chambers in parliamentary systems, which is quite interesting, although a lot of parliamentary systems have them. So often, members of second chambers are getting into the chamber in different ways other than direct elections. Sometimes it's a mixture. So if you look at somewhere like Italy, it's mostly directly elected, but then you have a handful of appointed members. If you look at Spain, there is a mixture of directly elected members and members who are elected by the provincial legislatures. So a mixture of what we call directly elected and indirectly elected. And in some places, it's a mixture of indirectly elected and appointed etc. So they're very varied. The obvious comparator to the House of Lords, the closest one there is, is the Canadian Senate, which was in some ways is based on the House of Lords. And it is entirely appointed with the members chosen by the Prime Minister. But it's gone through some quite interesting reforms in recent years, which we might come to when we talk about reform of the Lords, I suppose, because I think there could be some lessons there.
Alan Renwick 11:46
Let's actually move on then to discussing reform in the House of Lords and particularly thinking about these proposals coming from Gordon Brown and Kier Starmer. So their saying that the House of Lords should be abolished and replaced with a directly elected chamber that is elected from the UK's nations and regions. And they are saying that its function should be particularly be to protect constitutional principles, principles enshrining the powers of the devolved the various devolved entities around the UK, of course, the UK famously has an uncodified unentrenched constitution. So the idea is that we should provide protection for these constitutional principles through the second chamber. Is that a sensible second chamber to wish for? And we will want to get on to the question of whether it's feasible to get there, but just in terms of that, as a destination that we might aim for, is that is that a sensible thing to be aiming for?
Meg Russell 12:44
Broadly, it's sensible, and as much as it's in line with the way a lot of countries organise their second chamber. So to continue talking about overseas examples, it's very, very common to have a membership of the second chamber which reflects the territorial structure of the state. So we've mentioned the US Senate that famously has two senators per state irrespective of the population of that state. So it's very much a house of the states, the big states have the same number of members as the small states. Spain actually has something relatively similar. You see the same thing again, in Canada, where they are appointed, in Australia, where they are directly elected very, very common that.
There is a question that's quite frequent around the world as to how you can meaningfully make representatives of these territorial units actually talk to each other as territorial representatives. Because in most countries around the world, legislatures are dominated by political parties. And so you know, if you look at somewhere like Australia, or South Africa, or the US, people are primarily the representatives of their party's over and above being the representative of their states a lot of the time. And so they sit in most second chambers in party blocks rather than regional blocks, and parties tend to vote together rather than regions voting together. There are some exceptions to that. One of which I think is South Africa, which is not one that I know particularly well. But another one is Germany, which is the most sort of strongly federal second chamber in the world, where the representatives are representatives of state governments. So they're not actually directly elected. They're elected to govern in the state. And then they come together in the second chamber. It's pretty much an intergovernmental forum, and they actually sit in their state blocks, and they vote as state blocks.
But that's quite hard to achieve. It's really only in Germany that that happens in such a kind of distinct and clear way. And it's a complaint that these other countries like Canada, Australia, Spain, etc, often have about their second chambers that ostensibly they're there to represent the state or the provinces, but actually their party political chambers. And so I think we need to think about that when we're thinking about an alternative to the House of Lords, whether there really is any feasible way that we could make people speak for, say, the Southwest or the Northeast of England, or speak for Wales, or speak for Scotland rather than speaking for Labour or the Conservatives or the SNP. And that's quite hard to achieve.
So I think this is one of the things that people have been saying about the Brown proposals, that the idea of protecting the constitutional settlement through a second chamber and in particular protecting the territorial settlement looks very sensible. But how do you make sure that it isn't just either a partisan rubber stamp for the party which is in control in the lower house, if they have a majority in the upper house, or else a blocking majority controled by an opposition party if the government doesn't have a majority? And I think that's a real conundrum, which is going to need thinking through if the Brown proposals or anything like them are going to be made to work.
Alan Renwick 16:05
And I guess that fear might lead to a related fear that if you have people who are elected on some kind of party ticket, then you're also going to lose the kind of expertise that the House of Lords currently has. And if you're valuing the fact that the House of Lords provides a different sort of scrutiny, more expertise based scrutiny than the House of Commons, then you might actually lose the good bit of the House of Lords while introducing this new model.
Meg Russell 16:33
Yes, I think there are some risks there. I think when you think through the expertise in the House of Lords, it's important not to be too romantic about it. The majority of members of the House of Lords do sit for political parties, and some of them vote pretty loyally for their political parties. But there are two ways in which there's more independence in the place. Firstly, quite a few of the party representatives are people who are appointed late in their careers, they've maybe already been members of the House of Commons, or they've been council leaders or that kind of thing. So they're not really looking for career advancement anymore. They speak from a point of view of experience, and they're not trying to climb some kind of ministerial ladder. So they have a relative independence from the parties. And sometimes they will express that through speaking or through abstaining. Sometimes they do wish to do so by voting against their parties, but it's generally those sort of softer forms of resistance that you see from them.
And then of course, there's the block who don't take a party whip at all. And I think that is one of the things that people are going to be most concerned about in the Brown proposals that the Brown proposals follow a long string of proposals. You know, you said, I've been studying this over 20 years, we've seen over 20 years of proposals starting with the Royal Commission, which reported in the year 2000, trying to think about how to link a reformed second chamber to the devolution settlement. But most of those sets of proposals have suggested that we retain a minority group who are appointed and independent of political parties. So generally, it's been suggested 20% of members should be appointed, and then to be independent. And then for example, Nick Clegg's proposals, which were about 10 years ago, under the coalition government would have had 80% elected members. I find it a bit strange that Brown has dropped that commitment to the 20% independent appointed people, the people who are not in political parties, because that's a valued part of the Lord's, and it's valued by people in the general population. You know, there are a lot of things to not like in the House of Lords. But if you ask people what they like about it, they'll say, well, it's got people in there who aren't from political parties. So to try and take that away, is a bit troubling, I think.
Alan Renwick 18:55
Shall we dig a little bit deeper into public opinion on this? You and I have both been doing some research together that has included some questions on public attitudes to the House of Lords, but you've been doing research on public attitudes to the House of Lords for a very long time. So one might assume that public opinion would simply favourite democratic election. But you're suggesting that that's not entirely the case?
Meg Russell 19:18
No, I could repeat two sets of questions. There was one from 10 plus years ago, which then we sort of repackaged and did in a different way recently, and they gave pretty consistent answers. So the original question asked people in a survey whether they thought that the House of Lords or a replacement for it should be majority elected, because that would bring democratic legitimacy, etc. And you find that about three quarters of people agree with that statement. But then the very same survey also asked people did they think that the House of Lords should be majority appointed because that would allow there to be people who were independent of political party and you can have respected experts. About three quarters of people agree with that statement as well. These are the same people in the same survey, which is clearly somewhat contradictory.
We asked the question in a in a slightly different way, we asked, we tried to force people to choose, did they think there should be, we didn't say majority. But did they think they should be elected people to bring democratic legitimacy? Did they think they should be appointed people to bring expertise and independence? Or did they agree with both statements equally. And you found that they split about a third, a third, a third, between people who see the merits of election, people who see the merits of appointment, and people who clearly see the merits of both. And this is part of a survey where there are a lot of concerns, you know, and this is not anything particularly new about elected politicians and the degree to which they have legitimacy. You know, politicians are not terribly popular. Another another survey question that I ran, how many years ago, maybe eight years ago or something from memory, asked people did they think that the House of Lords generally did a good job? And you got some kind of a narrow majority agreeing that it did, it was something like 50 to 54% from memory. Which, you know, it's not brilliant, but it's relatively high. Crucially, I also asked people did they think the House of Commons was generally doing a good job, and the number that said it was lower. So the House of Lords is not universally loved. But it's not necessarily loved any less than the House of Commons. And I think that one of the things around the world that people appreciate about second chambers is that they exist to keep the elected politicians in the first chamber and in the government in check. They're there to be the kind of grit in the oyster to ask the difficult questions to say, hang on a second, are you sure you're doing the right thing?
Generally, I think publics don't like unconstrained power. And second chambers, a bit like other other bits of the system, which are themselves generally not elected, like judges, like civil servants, like the media perhaps are not elected. But they ask awkward questions of the politicians and help to keep them honest. And so unelected second chambers can do that. Elected second chambers can as well. But then what you have is more of a situation of one set of elected politicians kind of trying to be a check on another set of elected politicians. So it's not straightforward in terms of public opinion at all.
Alan Renwick 22:33
So I'll ask you in just a moment what reforms you think should happen, but you've already given us some hints of that I guess. Just before we get there, we've talked about whether the Brown/Starmer proposals offer desirable end goal for a reform process. But we should also talk about whether a reform in that direction is feasible. And I know you have big concerns about whether it's actually plausible to think that this kind of major reform package could be introduced. Do you want to just outline why you have doubts about that?
Meg Russell 23:06
Well, I think you've just got to look to history, really. I mean, it's I found it slightly amusing that the Brown commission report included some words from the 1911 Parliament Act, which was the Act of Parliament, which famously reduced the powers of the House of Lords from a power of absolute veto to one of delay. Obviously, what 111 years ago now and had in its preamble these words that it is not possible, just at the moment to replace the House of Lords with a more democratic chamber, but so you know, we're going to come to that in the fullness of time, and we're still waiting.
So there have been repeated attempts to change the House of Lords. I mean, it's interesting. You asked about whether what the chamber does is useful. And I said, I thought, yes, it was. The Labour government that came to power by a landslide in 1945. That was a party which had since its very creation been in favour of the abolition of the House of Lords. But when it arrived for the landslide in 1945, it did not get rid of the House of Lords. In fact, it barely did anything. It didn't change its composition at all. And one of the reasons for that, a key reason for that I and as I understand, is that they realised that if they wanted to get through the degree of legislation that they, that they aspired to, they actually needed the legislative space of the House of Lords to consider all of the government's programme.
So we've had Labour governments repeatedly that have come in thinking they want to change the Lords and not getting to it. So Harold Wilson had a bill which famously fell apart in the House of Commons in the 1960s. And then Labour in 1997, arrived on a manifesto to have a two stage reform where the first thing they would do is get rid of the majority of hereditary peers, which they managed to do very early on in the Labour government, but the Labour government was there, the Blair and Brown governments, for 13 years, and they never proceeded with the second stage. They repeatedly publish white papers with proposals in them for reforms of various kinds. And those were repeatedly kind of knocked down. Initially, the suggestion was that there would be a relatively small number of elected members added to an appointed chamber. So maybe 20% elected 80% appointed and people complained that was nowhere near democratic enough. And there was this sort of bidding process where Labour moved up to one stage 50%, which just seemed to not please anybody. And then they actually moved up to 80% elected 20% appointed and people started to complain, this is too democratic, it's got too much legitimacy, it's going to challenge the House of Commons and get dangerous. And so labour never managed to move to the second stage of reform.
And similarly, the coalition government under Nick Clegg, his proposal was very similar for an 80% elected 20% appointed house, but it fell on its face in the House of Commons. It is interesting that these proposals don't fail in the Lord's, they never even reached the Lords you know, Blair never had a failed proposal which got through the Commons, and didn't clear the Lords, nothing ever got through the commons. Wilson's bill died in the commons, Clegg's bill died in the Commons. It is generally disagreements within the governing party about how powerful you want the second chamber to be. And actually fears in the government, in the governing party that if you give the chamber too much legitimacy, it will start to stand up to the government and the lower house more than it currently does. That prevents those reforms succeeding. And the brown reforms fit the same kind of model. You know, they're looking to produce a directly elected chamber, the removal of the appointed members removes any sense that this has less democratic legitimacy than the House of Commons. And I suspect that members of the House of Commons themselves will start to get nervous about that when they're really confronted with the with the detail.
Alan Renwick 26:57
So we have only a few minutes left. The key question is, what then should an incoming Labour government do? I mean, it sounds like you're in principle in favour of something like the proposals that have been mooted in the past around 80% election 20% appointments, something like that. But you also think that it would be very hard to get there, at least in one step. So what would your recommendation be to an incoming Labour government?
Meg Russell 27:23
Well, I think that the Brown proposals are supposed to be there to be consulted on, it's not yet clear how that consultation process is going to work. But clearly, people will express their views and Kier Starmer is due to reflect on whatever comes in from that consultation. I suspect that what will come back will probably push rather more in the direction of some of those proposals that we've seen before. So to reintroduce the 20% appointed element to be independent, for example. The Brown proposals don't include any detail on things like the electoral system, the electoral boundaries, the length of terms that elected members would serve. And these are fundamental. So it's really very sketchy the proposal on the Lord's. And I suspect that on reflection, the Labour Party may move back to something closer to what Labour proposed around 2008, and which Nick Clegg picked up subsequently, which was long terms of office, not electing all of them at once. So it's never got a fresher mandate than the House of Commons, maybe electing 1/3 every five years for 15 year terms, that kind of thing.
But that's going to be a process of considerable reflection. And they're going to have to, I think, if they're really serious about binding together, the parts of the UK do some really serious consultation, in Scotland, in Wales, all over England, in Northern Ireland, talk to local politicians, and also talk to the general public about what they want. But in the meantime, the House of Lords is a mess. You know, it does some good work. It has many good people in it. But it also has to echo the words of Brown, some indefensible elements. You know, he says the House of Lords itself is indefensible. I think there are elements of it, certainly, which are indefensible.
One particular problem is the size of of the place, I refer to how it's got 800 members, it's crept up by about 150 members since it was last reformed 20 years ago. And that needs dealing with. But fundamentally, the problem which drives that increase in size and drives a lot of the concerns about propriety and about the quality of the people who sit in there, is that the primary way to get into the House of Lords is to be appointed by the Prime Minister, with essentially no check on that Prime Ministerial power. So we have an extraordinary situation we're in 2022, the Prime Minister can decide how many people to appoint to the second chamber, what the balance should be between them, and they don't even have to pass any kind of qualification threshold. And as I've said, one of the worst aspects of that is that Prime Ministers have learned now, that by over appointing to the House of Lords, they can discredit the House of Lords. And I think at times they have done that actually deliberately because it weakens the House of Lords against the government.
So I think the most urgent reform that we need is a check on that Prime Ministerial patronage power. We need a limit on the size of the place. We need a clear formula for how the seats are divided up between political parties based on some kind of proportionality, linked probably to general election votes, but reflected in appointments. We need a guarantee for the number of independent members that are in there. And we need some kind of better quality checking. We have a House of Lords Appointments Commission, but at the moment, it picks the independent members and it does a good job of that and people like the independent members. But it can't question the suitability of party appointees, unless they've actually done something really dodgy. You know, it checks their criminal records, their tax affairs, that kind of thing. It doesn't ask why is this person going to be any good to be in the House of Lords? And I think we need to move to that.
There are also questions about whether the hereditary peers should still be there. In 1999, when Labour's last reform went through, they were supposed to be there on a temporary basis awaiting the next stage of reform. Well, it's been 23 years. And I think it's long past time that we actually got rid of the hereditary members, that would be a very small change, which very few people would disagree with.
So I suppose sorry, that's a very long answer. In summary, I would say the last really significant reform of the House of Lords that we had was the one in 1999 under Tony Blair, who arrived in office, as I said, on a promise to have a two stage reform. The small, simple thing was to get rid of the vast majority of hereditary peers, hundreds of hereditary peers left the House of Lords under that reform. And the house was, it was left unelected, but it was left much more legitimate and feeling much more confident than it had been before. And it became much more effective as a result.
So my advice to Kier Starmer would be follow that model, you know, you it's, it's all very well to have an ambitious programme for reform. And by all means, consult on it and see what you can do and try and get it through. But do please first do the little essential things that nobody would really disagree with, in terms of having quality checks on the number of peers, on the on the on the individual peers who go in capping the size of the place, and having some sort of proper regulated balance between the parties, plus maybe getting rid of the hereditary peers. He could do that very quickly. And then we can talk for as long as we like about the next stage. And maybe it'll happen and maybe it won't, but at least Labour would have achieved something.
Alan Renwick 33:04
Well, I could very happily go on talking for as long as we liked about this subject, because there's so many more questions that I'm very keen to ask. But alas, we are out of time. Meg that has been a really fantastic overview of these debates and summary of some of the big issues that need to be thought about. And for full details of Meg's further thinking if you want to dig deeper into these issues, you will find Meg's books, reports and other outputs relating to the House of Lords are listed on the Constitution Unit's website. And we'll put all the details of that in the show notes for this episode. And look at also for a new report that Meg is writing at the moment on Lords reform, which will be out early in 2023.
This is our last episode of 2022. We're taking a Christmas break for the next few weeks, but we'll be back in the new year when our topic will be important but sombre, the impact of war on infant mortality. I should also say that if you were expecting to hear an episode with UCL Policy Lab Director Mark Steers this week, we had to move the schedule around a little bit but fear not, he will be joining us before too long.
Remember to make sure you don't miss out on future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics all you do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts or whatever podcast provider you use.
I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Conor Kelly and Eleanor Kingwell-Banham, our theme music is written and performed by John Mann. This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening and have a very happy Christmas